Serious problem with sky stitching with apg 3.7

by **Destiny** » Wed Nov 19, 2014 9:57 am

Re: Serious problem with sky stitching with apg 3.7

by Destiny » Wed Nov 19, 2014 9:57 am

Hi... I just tried Pfactory since I have had it for many years but never really liked it... I have V5.3 Mac.. Horrible results.. What camera model did you use.. I left it as it indicated..

Here is the results. Your images really are troublesome.. Little to know thought about lighting.. Without RAW images, I feel the results will never be perfect..

Destiny..

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by **miska** » Mon Dec 15, 2014 5:06 pm

Re: Serious problem with sky stitching with apg 3.7

by miska » Mon Dec 15, 2014 5:06 pm

Hi,
I have been having similar problems with APG. I don't think the causes are the same as for the OP, but the symptoms are very similar:
Color shifts and intensity variations in smooth skies, that are perhaps hinted in the original pictures, but get massively amplified by APG.
For me the origin of these of these defects are different:
- Color shift in optics (I use a medium format digital back, with a tech camera, and sometimes these fantastic optics have a bit of residual color shift (blue -> magenta) at the edges of the field)
- Residual vignetting, due to either the optics (I am not using a center filter on some optics), or using a lens adapter (Canon Optics on Sony camera, so the Lightroom vignetting correction is not always perfect).

These two things seem to get amplified by APG, rendering the final pano close to unusable. Yes, there are way to "tweak" the result, like the Blending level = 0, change the color correction, or even rendering two panos with different APG settings (one to produce a smooth sky, another for the foreground) and then blending them by hand in PS.

But I feel that back in the days of smartblend, I did not have to play for 15 minutes with parameters (it's AUTOpano Pro after all, not tweak-for-15-minutes-pano Pro). It just worked out of the box. That's why I bought an Autopano license. Since then, the software has evolved, and we have sometimes lost the "it's a tank for panoramas" results. Now it's more like a Ferrari, where the pro driver can get excellent results, but when there's a bump in the road, you have to call an Italian mechanic to fix it.

Now don't get me wrong, APG has superb control point detection, the workflow to produce many panos in a batch is great. BUT, sometimes APG fails miserably in situations where I think it should not. It looks to me, that those situations are where the original pictures have some (minor) flaw.
In those cases, Microsoft ICE (that's another free software you can test in the pano software deathmatch) or PtGui seem to do a much better job at blending (and it's blending, they are clearly not as good for control point handling). Sometimes better than whatever I can get by tweaking APG parameters.

Just my 2c worth...

by **miska** » Mon Dec 15, 2014 8:03 pm

Re: Serious problem with sky stitching with apg 3.7

by miska » Mon Dec 15, 2014 8:03 pm

And about those "well you could take better care in taking your pictures for the pano". Sure. But why have a super clever high tech blender then ? The role of the blender is to take all the imperfections in the picture (vignetting, different shutter speeds, WB differences, parallax,...) and make them fit in the panorama as best as it is possible. For some reasons, right now, APG seems to need improvements in that area. I sure hope v. 4 addresses those issues. Or perhaps having the option to get a sort of smartblend back (probably doesn't work for gigapanos though - and I suspect that's what "broke" the blender - the ability to make gigapanos makes blending a whole lot more tricky).

by **Destiny** » Tue Dec 16, 2014 12:55 am

Re: Serious problem with sky stitching with apg 3.7

by Destiny » Tue Dec 16, 2014 12:55 am

Under Plugin Wizard, you have an option to correct Vignetting... as well as other issues... To be honest, you are better off using RAW to fix Vignetting and all other issues..

Destiny..

by **gkaefer** » Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:19 pm

Re: Serious problem with sky stitching with apg 3.7

by gkaefer » Wed Dec 17, 2014 12:19 pm

not perfect at all my try....
apg 3.7.1 with some changed Settings (you can see them in screenshot which I disabled or changed)
... but not bad for 2 min. time I needed...

as others said already: invest 5% more time and do manual shots and you can save 300% time needed for postproduction...
even if you choose a complete wrong Manual WB or underexpose/overexpose all of your Images. its far easier to correct them in once (raw source Images) than struggling later with single Images not fitting.

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